The revelations circulated first in manuscript and in church newspapers, and their printing was itself eventful. The 1833 Book of Commandments, the first attempt to publish them at Independence, Missouri, was interrupted when a mob destroyed the press, and surviving copies rank among the rarest of American books. Two years later at Kirtland, Ohio, the church published an enlarged collection under the new title Doctrine and Covenants, prefacing the revelations with the Lectures on Faith, a theology course from the Kirtland school; the 1835 edition was formally accepted by conference vote, establishing the pattern by which common consent canonises text in the movement.
Later Latter-day Saint editions added sections, dropped the Lectures on Faith in 1921, and modernised the apparatus, the current edition numbering 138 sections plus the two Official Declarations. The movement's 1844 succession crisis split the canon as well as the church. Community of Christ, the line organised around Joseph Smith III, kept the Doctrine and Covenants open in a stronger sense: its prophet-presidents have continued to bring sections for conference approval to the present day, addressing matters from the ordination of women to the sacredness of creation, while removing the plural marriage revelation the Utah church retained. The two books that share a name and a core are therefore living documents of two diverging traditions, and scholars read their differences as a map of the movement's history.